When total escape is what you crave, size matters. Gully Wells alights on three minuscule Caribbean isles where the capitals are villages, the boats outnumber taxis, and the only thing overwhelming is the quiet

If you happen to live in a city only slightly less charming than Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the sex appeal of a tiny island is just about impossible to resist. It is almost as if the human soul has been programmed in some primeval way to yearn for those places that are in perfect scale—a world you can hold in the palm of your hand. The golden mean instead of the Golden Arches, roosters instead of alarm clocks (aren't we all sufficiently alarmed as it is?), goats instead of lawn mowers, scooters instead of SUVs. And how about an island with two cheerfully underemployed cops and a six-room hotel without a single lock or key? The bewildering, overwhelming surfeit of choices is surely one of the most exhausting aspects of twenty-first-century life. And then there's the unbearable heaviness of being—the relentless pressure on our limited time and energy. How is it that we find ourselves living in places so enormous and complicated that they seem way beyond our control? No wonder our frazzled psyches fantasize about tiny, faraway islands where the toughest decision is choosing which beach to loll about on that day. But how to find these elusive, miniature fragments of nirvana?

When it comes to Caribbean islands, Calvin Trillin once made the helpful distinction between a "Tropical Isle" and an "Actual Place." And so, when I got serious and studied the map, I quickly eliminated islands big enough to sustain any semblance of what passes for "real life." Out went Actual Places such as Trinidad, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. My frayed nerves were certainly in no state to take on Cuba or Haiti, and even more developed islands such as Barbados seemed too much of a challenge. Which left me with a long string of Tropical Isles—stretching like dislocated vertebrae from South America to Puerto Rico—from which to choose three idyllic escapes. At this point, I should perhaps explain that the map was small and my eyes far from perfect, but this meant that I was able to hit upon a simple but perfect solution to my problem: Any island that I could actually see without my glasses was clearly of no use. Now I was down to a handful of dots. But dots can be tricky. Too dotty and you find yourself on a desert island straight out of a New Yorker cartoon, one with a single palm tree and a possibly psychotic Man Friday for company. Call me an oxymoron, but I wanted sophisticated dots. I was determined to find three tiny, yet interesting, islands that were as different in their geography, language, culture, politics, and social life as it is possible to be. And you know what? I did.

Right off the southern coast of Guadeloupe lie Les Saintes, only two of which are actually inhabited. Minute, forgotten outposts of the mother island, they developed along very different lines over the centuries. Whereas Guadeloupe was one of the richest sugar-producing islands in the French Caribbean, with vast plantations, hundreds of thousands of slaves, and a white upper crust, known as the Békés—who still retain a certain amount of social, economic, and political clout—Les Saintes were impoverished specks whose poor white population, mainly descended from Breton immigrants, subsisted almost entirely through fishing and boat building. On the largest island, Terre-de-Haut (about three miles long and a mile or so wide), tourism has only recently supplanted fishing as the main money spinner, but even with more visitors, the island has kept its original toy-town charm and scale.